Internet helps brutal governments retain control, paper says

[Adam Powell]

The subject line of this message is not supported by the paper.

The full paper, posted at http://www.ceip.org/files/pdf/21KalathilBoas.pdf,
says the Internet is not necessarily "an insurmountable threat to
authoritarian rule." That is different from saying the Internet "helps
brutal governments retain control."

The paper begins by noting recent scholarship that has found a positive
correlation between Net penetration and democratization -- and correctly
noting that does not imply causality, any more than the crowing of a rooster
causes the sun to rise.

But by relying on official government data on computer *ownership* and on
*registered* email accounts, the authors may have encountered a
methodological problem that has skewed data for many countries around the
world -- including the US.

Throughout Asia and Africa and especially in China (I don't have first-hand
knowledge of Cuba), relying on such data means you miss the vast majority of
the online community that uses hotmail accounts, proxy servers and
cybercafes or other non-owned machines for Net access.

For every registered user we met in China, we met several who were not
registered. So instead of the official Beijing number of 26.5 million people
on line (that's the *official* number from China Internet Network
Information Center reported today, up 56.8% from last year - details at
http://www.freedomforum.org/templates/document.asp?documentID=14423) most
experts we contacted said the ratio of unregistered to registered users is
4:1, yielding a total of well over 100 million.

That's still a small percentage in a country of billions, but it is
different from the paper's 17 million. Why lower than the official numbers?
The citation in a footnote takes you to www.chinaoline.com, a Web site in
Chicago.

The page cited notes one "definition of Internet users rules out Web surfers
in Internet cafis" - which would seem to be a problem in a country full of
hotmail and yahoo email accounts. So instead they use another method to
reach these new, lower numbers: they "conducted online and written surveys
of each group to determine the proportion of Web users within each group.
The total number of Chinese Internet users was then obtained by calculating
the proportion of these groups in relation to the total Chinese population."

These are people who go to great pains *not* to be counted or found by the
government, but somehow they are expected to respond to an official survey.
And if they do not complete the survey, these people do not exist.

We also are receiving email from people in countries where, according to
this paper, all such traffic is monitored and all users are registered. Not
so. Students all seem to know how to use proxy servers and anonymizers and
avoid official scrutiny -- and are not reported by those relying on official
numbers.

But more broadly, the problem is with the "one machine, one user" model of
the Internet that most in North America and Europe assume is the standard
worldwide. Not so: in Africa, Asia and South America, the standard is "one
machine, many users." One example is at
www.freedomforum.org/templates/document.asp?documentID=11876 based on our
first-hand observations and research on the ground, and there are many
others on our site.

This is not to say the Internet must inevitably topple undemocratic
governments. That is the straw man addressed in this report's introduction.
But this is to say that it is an important influence in totalitarian
countries, enabling a still small but rapidly growing minority to access
information directly from outside of their countries -- and to relay that
information and their personal views via email to others.

Otherwise, what are we to make of the reports by the BBC and the NY Times
that China has been forced to change "official" versions of news stories
because Chinese can send email to each other (and to those outside of China)
with first-hand accounts of what actually happened?

Cheers
Adam

**********




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